8 Plugins to Help Supercharge Your WordPress Media Library

The WordPress Media Library is a baked-in element that offers basic media file management for your website. While its feature set is generally sufficient for the average user, for media-heavy sites its limitations become increasingly apparent. For example, you could struggle to find previously uploaded images, find that unoptimized media is causing strain on your server, or even find your site’s speed suffers as a result of a bloated media library.

In this post, we’ve rounded up eight plugins that will make your life easier when using the WordPress Media Library. Let’s get started!

Focused mainly on providing better media organization, the Enhanced Media Library plugin enables you to categorize and reorder your files in a number of different ways. It also comes with additional functionality such as the ability to create dynamic galleries from media file categories or tags, and insert them into custom posts or pages using shortcodes.

While WordPress gives you a lot of baked-in options for tinkering with your media files, it doesn’t let you rename your media files directly. Making sure your media filenames are descriptive offers a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefit, as well as a neater Media Library to boot.

The Media File Renamer plugin enables you to automatically rename your media files based on the title you set within the Media Library. The premium version adds functionality such as renaming the file based on your post’s title, your alt text, or even manually.

Key Features:

Enables you to automatically rename media files based on their title.

Offers the ability to auto-update references to your media files after renaming them.

Quality images are important for a modern website. However, uploading high-resolution images to WordPress can often be overkill given that you’ll likely use a scaled down version within your posts and pages. Of course, the original version of your image is still in the WordPress Media Library, eating up valuable space.

Enter Imsanity. This plugin automatically takes your uploaded images and automatically resizes the dimensions to something more manageable. In other words, it helps you make sure you hit a ‘sweet spot’ with regard to the dimensions of your uploaded images, which of course impacts file sizes.

The Imagify plugin could be seen as a complement to Imsanity, because while it’s primarily an image optimizer, it also includes a similar resizing feature. Image compression can help you to improve your page load speeds, and is particularly relevant for a mobile-friendly website. Of course, you also get to save valuable server space due to the reduced file size.

During our own (admittedly non-scientific) tests, we were able to reduce image size by over 50% with barely any visible loss in quality, which was pretty impressive!

Image Watermark WP is the ideal plugin to prevent people stealing your images and re-uploading them to their own websites, or even worse ‘hotlinking’ them and stealing your site’s bandwidth.

This plugin negates the need for graphic design skills, as it automatically watermarks any uploaded images based on your predefined settings, effectively making image theft harder and a lot less appealing.

Properly crediting your media files can be cumbersome process, especially when you source media from multiple websites. Media Credit takes the pain out of the process by providing a dedicated field when uploading or editing your media files. The credits you add are tied to that image too, and will be automatically included whenever you insert the image.

Key Features:

Automatically adds credits to inserted media files.

Offers customization of your credits via CSS.

Lets you display all media credited to a specific author on a dedicated page.

Together with your title, featured images can literally make or break your post’s performance. They’re essentially your post’s first impression, so they need to be compelling and captivating.

Of course, WordPress makes it easy to set featured images out of the box. However, changing them later means editing each post individually. The Quick Featured Images plugin solves this by letting you bulk edit your featured images. What’s more, it enables you to define custom rules so you don’t have to manually set a featured image for each post. Instead, you can automatically assign one based on your settings.

Key Features:

Enables you to bulk edit your featured images.

Offers custom presets and rules to automatically set featured images for posts.

Our final plugin is Media from FTP. Sometimes, uploading large media files directly through the WordPress interface can let you down. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t natively support alternative media file upload options. While you can always upload files through your web server’s control panel, a custom script, or File Transfer Protocol (FTP), WordPress won’t register those files.

Media from FTP was designed to solve this exact problem. Whether you’re having issues uploading files through the WordPress interface or just prefer FTP, Media from FTP does what it says on the tin. It enables you to upload media files via FTP, then displays them within the WordPress Media Library as with any other images.

Key Features:

Lets you look up media files in a specific physical folder, then register them inside WordPress.

Enables you to set media properties such as date and time stamps.

Lets you set a predefined schedule to run the plugin at specific intervals.

Conclusion

The WordPress Media Library is suitable for many users as-is; however, if you need additional functionality you could be left wanting. Out of the box, WordPress’ functionality lacks for some users who operate media-heavy websites.

The eight plugins we’ve suggested in this post focus on extending the WordPress Media Library’s functionality, as well as closing the gap on some of its limitations. Whether you’re looking for a new way to organize images, a method for applying credits to your media, an alternative upload method, or even an optimization method or two, there should be something here for you!

What functionality are you missing within the WordPress Media Library, and have any of these plugins helped you close the gap? Let us know in the comments section below!

Article image thumbnail: Vector Goddess / shutterstock.com.

By John Hughes

John is a blogging addict and WordPress fanatic

Explore Divi, The Most Popular WordPress Theme In The World And The Ultimate Page Builder

Check Out These Related Posts

Video is a valuable form of content for social media. Unfortunately, creating quality videos is usually a long process that involves moving mobile footage to a desktop app for editing. However, mobile editing is on the rise. Apps such as Splice Video Editor make it possible to efficiently create...

When you set up a new WordPress website, the platform gives you three image sizes to play with: thumbnail, medium, and large (plus the file’s original resolution). This gives you a solid number of options to work with. However, thumbnails in particular can be tricky to use, since you need to...

When given the choice between using a vector icon or a static image, it’s a good idea to go with the vector. They’re small and fast to load, and they can scale to any size without a loss of resolution. Font Awesome is a superb library of vector icons that you can use on your websites,...

32 Comments

This post is perfect for me as I’ve just taken on an existing site to manage for a client where 75% of their images aren’t optimised. One jpeg is 13mb! The Imagify plug in will save me hours of time, thanks!

Hi Andre. I’m afraid those links don’t seem to work for me, and it’s hard to help without knowing your exact setup. Try posting in our forums (https://www.elegantthemes.com/forum/) to see if another user has any ideas.

– Media cleaner from Jordy Meow: it still requires some improvement but used with care I helpd me go from over 700 media present on the media library to only 150 media that were really used on the site! Follow carefully the instructions ad do a proper backup of your database and upload directory BEFORE using it but it’s worth a try.

Two more plugins that I use as a photographer with many thousands of photos on my website is MLA (media library assistant) and WP/LR (WordPress Lightroom). WP/LR allows me to send files directly from Adobe Lightroom to the media library using a Lightroom publish service, and automatically updates them within WordPress when I make edits in Lightroom.

MLA picks up the files as they arrive in the media library, assigns category tags from the Lightroom keywords, and then creates dynamic galleries via shortcodes.

I use these extensively to keep about a dozen dynamic galleries up to date on my website simply by assigning a keyword to photos in Lightroom and pushing the publish button.

John Hughes
April 10, 2017

Hi Wade! Thanks for the suggestions; we’ll be sure to check them out.

Gareth
April 24, 2017

I use both of these too – being able to manage all my images from the source in Lightroom is a huge advantage – I can also watermark them when I export to WordPress – so it doesn’t have to be a separate step.

I was looking at the Image Watermark WP plugin which looked ideal. Loaded it for my art gallery site. Unfortunately it only works on GMedia and doesn’t work on WPMedia and the Divi Gallery. As I have bought the Divi package and want to use Divi gallery this was no good for me. On the settings there is a link for support. I tried that and got a 404 error. Looks, as I said, like an ideal package for our use but is unusable at this moment. The link error doesn’t exactly inspire.